TEXTXET | A workshop on thinking with form, material and content with Renuka Rajiv and Pahul Singh

We are excited to present TEXTXET, a workshop by artists Renuka Rajiv and Pahul Singh, unfolding alongside the ongoing display at Project_Space, Zindha Laash / AutoZombie 2.0.

Zindha Laash / Autozombie 2.0 is a display that brings together various meandering aspects of the book form, a key part of Renuka’s drawing and paper-based practice. Taking forward certain formal elements from Renuka’s own experiments with drawing, writing and collage as well as from Pahul’s oeuvre of book-making and design, TEXTXET will open up ways of thinking spatially with text, across form/medium/function, working with creative strategies and practice of co-making and reading.

Deadline for applications: Tuesday, 24 October 2023

Workshop dates: 27 & 28 October; 6, 7, 8 and 9 November
Venue: The FICA Reading Room, Lado Sarai, New Delhi

About the workshop:

This two week-long workshop will engage with playful ways of working with text as material and content. It will begin with exploring the well-worn but ever fresh cut-up technique used by prominent writers such as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. Using material from the FICA Reading Room library as a take-off point, participants will be invited to create textual works that take shape in and as artist-book forms.

The second part of the workshop will involve working with Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room in Lado Sarai, New Delhi to create a collective installation-exhibit over four days. Participants will explore the physical and visual ways in which text can exist—as drawing, sculpture, performance and sound. The cut-up textual works and books made in the first week of the workshop will serve as objects to be installed in the space as well as starting points for us to visualise playful interventions towards the creation of an immersive experience.

The structure of the workshop is as follows:

  • Introductory sessions (on-site) at the FICA Reading Room: 27 & 28 October

  • Working week (home or on-site): 29 October - 5 November

  • Culminating sessions (on-site) at the FICA Reading Room: 6, 7, 8 & 9 November

Please note:

  • Participants are required to be present for the whole duration of the workshop.

  • All are welcome to apply. There are no other prerequisites for applying to participate in the workshop.

  • The introductory sessions to the workshop will be conducted at the FICA Reading Room (27 - 28 October), following which participants will have a week to continue working on their projects at home or on-site (29 October - 5 November) before reconvening at the Reading Room for the second part of the workshop (6 - 9 November).

Please submit your applications only via the Google Form linked below.

 

About the facilitators:

Renuka Rajiv has had an interest in making things since childhood, exploring drawing, paper mache, tie-dye and stitching. They studied digital video production at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with Honours) majoring in printmaking at Victorian College of Art, Melbourne. Since then, their work has reconnected with the childhood interests of playing with fabric and paper. Most themes and content in their work is personal, which includes the compulsion towards the hand-made. Their work inhabits a space that accommodates the imaginative, observational and autobiographical. Since 2012 they have been exhibiting regularly in group and solo shows. Recently they have exhibited at Walkin Studios (Bangalore), Home Sweet Home (Bangalore), Vadehra Art Gallery (Delhi), Stockroom (Kyneton), Blakdot (Melbourne), Brunswick Artspace (Melbourne) and Feltspace (Adelaide). Their animation was also included in the Festival Mondial des Cinemas Sauvages (Brussels). Prizes include FICA Emerging Artist Award, Substation exhibition prize and City of Stonington Print Prize. They have been on art residencies at CONA (Bombay), T.A.J. (Bangalore) and Pro Helvetia + FICA (Lucerne).

Pahul Singh (b. 1996) is a practitioner based in Jaipur, Rajasthan. She completed her BFA in Painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. She holds an MVA from The Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda, where she was awarded the Narendra Gajanan Bhatt Gold Medal and the Late Milind Madhukar Bhade Gold Medal. An alphabet primer that once belonged to a linguistic outsider in Punjab marked the beginning of her engagement with book-making. She looks at translation, authorship re-authorship, and forms of displacements positioned in and around the book. Her work seeks to outline tensions between the intimate and the institutional, the oral and the written - vacillating across physicalities and interfaces. Pahul is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Award awarded by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (2022) and the Scholarship to Young Artists awarded by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India (2019-20). She has been artist-in-residence for KHOJ PEERS (2021) and Arthshila x FICA at Parivartan, Bihar (2023). Her participations include ‘Embark IV and V’ by Ark Foundation for the Arts (Vadodara), ‘Perceptual Transfers’ a video programme by VAICA for Mycelial Legacies, curated by Najrin Islam (New Delhi), ‘Fleeting Identities’ by MASH India (New Delhi) and the Kochi-Muziris Student’s Biennale ‘States of Disarray: Practice as Restitution’ among many others.